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Is the War on Drugs Effective?
The War on Drugs has not been effective. Prohibition has failed us in the past, and now drug prohibition only brings more social harm than it has been worth. As we have seen with the prohibition of alcohol, a great underworld of crime emerged, and organized crime used prohibition to make millions of dollars. In today's drug world thousands are dying and even more are not being treated as a sick human should be. The War on Drugs was meant to alleviate some of the social harms that drugs may bring. Instead it has caused social harm to the people it was trying to protect. Is it time to call an end to a war that some say cannot be won, and a war that is against its own people?

The War on Drugs as we know it founded its roots with the Harrison Act of 1914. This policy would set the ground work for present day drug policies on heroin and cocaine, and opened the doors to drug cartels like the Medellin Cartel, that arose in the mid-1970s after the Controlled Substance Act was set in place as a more powerful drug control policy (Lyman & Potter, 2003). This policy just seemed to make the drug communities organize their efforts for the distribution and use of drugs, and with organization comes the Organized Crime we see today. There are many organized crime cartels and families today, that are involved in drug trafficking, money laundering, extortion, gambling, fraud, prostitution, and many other criminal activities. These criminal groups didn't exist before alcohol prohibition, which gave the opportunity to form groups like these for monetary gain. The international drug market is worth billions of dollars annually and is not being taxed, and instead this untaxed money opens other doors for criminal behavior like money laundering. With the loss of millions in untaxed moneys, and billions on the effort to slow the drug market down, I would assume that in today's economy the American people could find a better way to use this money. This war is an expensive one, and is failing. We continue to waste tax dollars on this war, making career criminals rich, as we rack up more and more casualties of this war everyday. The victims are not just drug users, but their families, and the victims may lose everything, even their lives. As an underground market, there are no rules that have to be followed in the illegal drug business besides the ones that make cartels more money and don't get them caught.
Even the law enforcers seem to be

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